Lectionary Homily for 09 August 2026 (11th Sunday after Pentecost)

Readings

• Job 38:4–18
• Psalm 18:1–16
• Romans 10:5–17
• Matthew 14:22–33

Homily Transcript

What sort of a God do you have? In one sense, the question can have only one answer, for the Lord God is and remains your God, whether you reject Him or not. The Ancient Israelites rejected God time and time again, and yet He remains on His throne. In another sense, the question is, perhaps, more interesting. What is your conception of the God you claim to worship? If your god would not flood the world and destroy nearly all life, then you surely have another god, not the Lord God. If your god would not command the genocide of a wicked race — to include the women and the children — then you have another god, not the Lord God. If your god will not bring this Creation to an end in flames and then consign His enemies to the same for eternity, then you have another god, not the Lord God.

The Reformed go too far in emphasizing God’s sovereignty and glory, for they do so to the extreme of effectively denying His mercy and His love — they fall off the right side of the horse. In a very real sense, Lutheranism has simply been the ship — the Ark, if you will — that has successfully navigated between Scylla and Charybdis, fallen off neither the right nor the left side of the horse, and we must be careful to do the same here: We must not so emphasize our Father’s other attributes that we — actually or effectively — deny His sovereignty or His glory. The Lord God is Master and Creator of all things. He is the Absolute Infinite, and all else is as nothing before Him. He made and named every star and He formed you in your mother’s womb and He knew your name in eternity past before your grandparents had even met. There is nothing that can contain God, for He contains all things. We could never fully describe God, for He describes all things. He is infinitely above and beyond us, and yet He also knows each and every one of us better than we shall ever know ourselves. We cannot, in absolute terms, overstate the magnificence, the awesomeness, or the glory of God.

The point of the Book of Job is the absolute transcendence, knowledge, power, and control of God over all things. At no point did anything happen to Job — and at no point has anything happened or will anything happen to you — that was not entirely within God’s control. Now, God did not personally inflict any evil on Job, but the devil is God’s devil and he has never ‘slipped his leash’. Whatever the devil did, God permitted; whatever the devil wanted to do, but did not, God prevented. The God Who set the boundaries of the sea, telling her ‘this far and no further’, also set the boundaries the demons cannot transgress. You will never suffer temptations or trials beyond what you can, by the grace and power of God, endure; even Job, the great patron saint of those who suffer for the sake of righteousness, was not tempted or afflicted beyond what God knew he could and would bear. Satan himself could not break righteous Job; whatever lesser tempter has been assigned to you will surely have even less success. This is not to minimize or downplay the suffering and trials of the average Christian; rather, it should be taken as a source of strength: God did not permit the archfiend who led angels astray and ushered sin into the world to break righteous and elect Job. The Good Shepherd will lose not one of His sheep to the wolves. But let us return to today’s text.

When God speaks to Job, does He justify Himself? Does He explain Himself? No. The first reply of God to Job is actually two verses before our reading:

“Who is this who darkens counsel / by words without knowledge?”

God’s first words to Job are a condemnation of Job’s complaint and lament, and they set the stage for the rest of God’s speech:

“Where were you when I was laying the earth’s foundation?

Now tell me, if you are endowed with understanding.

Who determined its measures, if you know?

Or who was it that stretched a line upon it?

On what have its rings been fastened?

And who is he that cast a cornerstone upon it?

When the stars were born,

all my angels praised me with a loud voice.

“Again, I shut up the sea with gates,

when it quivered with eagerness, as it issued from its mother’s womb,

and I made the cloud its clothing,

and with mist I swaddled it;

yes, I prescribed bounds for it,

setting bars and gates around it.

And I said to it, ‘Thus far you shall come,

and you shall not go beyond; rather, your waves shall be broken up within you!’

“Indeed, was it in your time that I instructed the morning light

and that the morning star saw its post,

to take hold of earth’s wings,

to shake the impious off it?

Indeed, was it you that took clay soil and formed a living creature,

and, able to talk, set him on earth?

Again, did you remove the light from the impious

and crush the arm of the proud?

“And did you go to the source of the sea

and walk in the tracks of the deep?

Again, do the gates of death open to you out of fear,

and did the porters of Hades cower when they saw you?

Again, have you been advised of the breadth of what is under heaven?

Do tell me how much it is.

“As well, in what kind of land does the light dwell,

and of what kind is the place of darkness?

Might you perhaps lead me to their borders?

And perhaps too you know their paths?

Thereby I know that you were born then,

and the number of your years is great!

“And have you gone to the storehouses of the snow,

and have you seen the storehouses of the hail?

But it is at your disposal for a time of enemies,

for a day of war and battle.

And from where does the hoarfrost come,

or from where is the south wind dispersed to what is under heaven?

“And who prepared a course for the driving rain

and a way for the tumults,

to bring rain on land, where there is no man,

wilderness, where there is no human in it,

to feed the untrodden and uninhabited

and to cause it to grow an effusion of greenery?

“Who is the rain’s father?

And who is it that has given birth to the dew’s nuggets?

And from whose womb does the ice come forth?

And who has given birth to freezing rain in the sky

that descends like flowing water?

And who froze the face of the deep?

“And did you understand the bond of Pleiades,

and did you open the barrier of Orion?

truly, will you open Mazouroth in its season,

and the Evening Star with its luminous tail—will you lead them

And do you know heaven’s changes

or the corresponding events under heaven?

“And will you summon a cloud by voice,

and will it obey you with a violent burst of water?

And will you send out thunderbolts—and will they go?

And will they say to you, ‘What is it?’

And who gave to women skill in weaving

or knowledge of embroidery?

And who is he that numbers the clouds in wisdom

and inclined the sky to the earth?

And dust has been poured out like soil,

but I have cemented it, like a block to a stone.

“And will you hunt prey for the lions

and satisfy the appetite of dragons?

For they are in a state of fear in their lairs,

and they crouch in the woods, lying in wait.

And who prepared food for the raven?

For its young have cried to the Lord as they wander about, searching for food.

Job responds correctly:

Why do I yet contend—being rebuked even while confuting the Lord,

hearing such things—when I am nothing?

And I, what answer shall I give to these things?

I will lay my hand on my mouth.

I have spoken once, but I will not add to a second time.

But the Lord continues His speech:

No, but gird up your loins like a man, and I will question you, but as for you, just answer me!

Do not shrug off my judgment.

And do you think I have dealt with you in any other way than that you might appear to be right?

Do you have an arm like the Lord,

or do you thunder with a voice like his?

“Go ahead take on loftiness and power,

and put on glory and honor.

And send forth messengers in wrath

and every insolent person humble.

Yes, extinguish the proud,

and at once make putrid the impious.

And hide them outside together in the earth,

and fill their faces with dishonor;

then I will acknowledge that your right hand can save.

“But look now, you are familiar with ‘monsters’;

they eat grass like cows.

Look now, its strength is in its loins,

and its power in its belly’s navel.

It stood up its tail like a cypress,

and its sinews have been interwoven.

Its flanks are flanks of copper,

and its spine is cast iron.

“This is the chief of what the Lord created,

made to be mocked at by his angels.

But when it went up on a steep mountain,

it brought gladness to the quadrupeds in Tartarus.

Under trees of every kind it lies down,

by the papyrus and reed and sedge.

And tall trees find themselves in its shade,

with limbs, as do the chaste-tree’s branches.

If there is a flood, it will never notice.

it trusts that the Jordan will tumble into its mouth.

Will he catch it in his eye;

while bent back, will he pierce its nose?

“And will you catch a dragon with a fish hook

and put a halter around its nose?

if you will fasten a ring in its nostril]

And will you pierce its lip with a ring?

And will it address you with a petition,

with a supplication, softly?

And will it make a covenant with you,

and will you take it as your perpetual slave?

And will you play with it as with a bird,

or tie it up like a sparrow for a child?

And do nations feed on it,

and do the Phoenician races divvy it up?

And a whole fleet, gathered, cannot carry the mere skin of its tail.

and its head in fishermen’s boats.

But you will lay a hand on it,

though you remember the battle that is waging in its body, and let it happen no more!

Job finally replies:

“I know that you can do anything,

and nothing is impossible for you.

For who is it that hides counsel from you,

and being sparing with words thinks to hide them from you as well?

But who will tell me what I did not know,

great and marvelous things that I did not understand?

Now hear me, Lord, that I too may speak;

then I will question you, and you, teach me!

Whereas before I would hear an aural report of you,

now, however, my eye has seen you;

therefore I disparaged myself and wasted away,

and I regard myself as dust and ashes.”«

And yet what does God ultimately say of the words of righteous Job? ‘He has spoken of Me what is right.’ What are we to make of all this?

Perhaps my earlier diction was (perhaps intentionally) too strong: Does God actually condemn what Job said in his lament? Certainly, He says that Job has ‘darkened counsel by words without knowledge’, but He finally assesses Job as having spoken what is right about God. In truth, God more or less ignores what all of the men have spoken and, instead, appeals to His glory as demonstrated in Creation. God does not reply to the words of Job; neither does He respond to the arguments, accusations, et cetera, of Job’s friends; instead, God simply speaks words of truth about Himself and about His Creation. Jesus sometimes does much the same in the pages of the New Testament: teaching instead of answering the question asked. And God is, indeed, teaching here, for those with ears to heard:

“Who is this who darkens counsel / by words without knowledge?”

This implies a number of things, two chief among them:

1. It is possible to speak wisely, with knowledge, about these matters.
2. Everything God does, He does with perfect knowledge, and everything that happens, happens within the bounds of God’s perfect knowledge (and control).

Again, all that happened to Job was known to God before it happened and was permitted by God according to His perfect knowledge, justice, and mercy. Nothing has ever happened without God’s permission; nothing ever will happen without God’s permission. And there is nothing hidden from His sight.

There are two ways God reveals knowledge about Himself: explicitly and implicitly. The former we all know and understand well (it is Scripture); the latter is that to which God appeals when speaking to Job, and it is also, in many ways, the greater revelation. But the implicit revelation requires greater effort from and makes greater demands upon the man who would obtain access to it. Scripture, of course, demands a lifetime (more than a lifetime, really) of study to truly understand all that it teaches about God and His Creation. This is not to say that some matters are not simple: The Gospel can be explain in ninety seconds. And yet there is an immense difference between the explicit and the implicit, but there are also immense rewards for those who invest time and effort into the implicit revelation. Some few things are known only from Scripture (e.g., the Gospel), but all else is known more fully (or even only) from Creation.

The more you study a masterpiece — whether a painting, a poem, a novel, a sculpture, or something else — the more you will discover; both about the piece and about the master who made it; the same is true of Creation: Everywhere you dig, you will find God, and the deeper you dig the more deeply you will encounter and understand God. You will find the Lord God in the ordering of the Solar System and the movement of the stars, and you will find Him in the rebirth of spring and every cell division. You will find Him in the pages of history and, when you arrive in the future, you will find Him already there waiting for you. With our modern technology, we can count our respiration rate, our heartbeat, and dozens of other such metrics, but the Lord God knew how many breaths you would take and how many times your heart would beat before you were even born. I have lived in some of the largest Western cities and camped in some of the most remote parts of this country; God was no further away in either location. There exists nowhere you could ‘escape’ from God. In the words of the Psalm:

Where should I go from your spirit?

And from your face where should I flee?

If I ascend to the sky, you are there;

if I descend to Hades, you are present.

If I were to take my wings at dawn

and make my covert at the farthest limits of the sea,

indeed, there your hand shall guide me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

And I said, “So then, darkness shall trample me,

and night be illumination in my delight,”

because darkness will not be made dark due to you,

and night will be illumined as day; as its darkness, so also its light.

The Book of Job is a book for Christians. Yes, certainly, I mean so in the sense that all Scripture is written for our instruction and our comfort, but I just as certainly mean so in the sense that one cannot read and understand Job and not become a Christian. Now, we could draw out the whole of Christian doctrine from Job, but that will have to wait for another day. Instead, let us focus on the core truths that are taught in Job: Although we are beset by troubles in this life (in the words of the hymn: ‘We walk in danger all the way.’) and although we will surely be tempted and tried by fire, we can yet remain confident that we have a Father above Who knows us, and orders all things; we will be neither tempted nor tried beyond what we can bear, and every trial and all suffering will be turned by God for our good. We rely neither upon our own strength, which would surely be insufficient for the task, nor upon our own wisdom, which would surely darken counsel; rather, we rely completely and totally upon our God and Father, for He knows all things and He has never failed, nor will He ever fail.

As the righteous Son of God suffered in our place, so the righteous son of Esau suffered for our benefit, that we might look to his example and take comfort in times of trial and affliction. It is unlikely that God will permit Satan himself to afflict and tempt you, and yet even should that worst of possibilities occur, we know that God will see us successfully through the storm, and will even reach out to rescue us, as He did with Peter. We rely not on our own strength, just as we rely not on our own works. Although we exist in time and must endure all things as they come, each in its own season, God is not bound by time; God saw Job vindicated and triumphant long before Satan had even requested to afflict him. When God looks at you, He certainly sees and understands your present trials, but He also sees your eternity; He knows that your name is inscribed in the Book of Life, and He knows precisely how He will turn your every temptation and trial and all your affliction and your suffering for your eternal good. He is your loving Father Who disciplines you for your good, and His Son is the Good Shepherd, Who never loses or abandons His sheep.

Life is short; eternity is long. We know ourselves and each other here in time only as we presently are — fallen, imperfect, afflicted; God knows us as we will be in eternity, as He always intended us to be — sinless, perfect, and content. We are, in this life, simultaneously saints and sinners — simul justus et peccator —, but the God Who perfectly knows every second of our lives — both here in time and there in eternity — knows that peccator will fall away and only justus will remain. When He looks at you, the Father sees the perfect righteousness of Christ which was made yours in the waters of Baptism. Although we have only a foretaste of that righteousness in this life, and the process of sanctification is never completed in this fallen world, we believe, teach, and confess that we will be fully and finally sanctified in the Resurrection of the Just. And a mystery still more glorious: God will not merely overlook or ignore our past sins in eternity; rather, He has promised that He will forget them. How God can forget, we do not (and likely cannot) know, but we do know what God has promised and that God never lies. I want you to think about that promise for a bit: God will remember your sins no more — He will forget them. All that exists exists by the power, knowledge, and wisdom of God, and the perfection of every instance (to include you and me) exists necessarily in the mind of God. To say that God does not know something is to say that it does not exist — more, that it never existed at all.

Your sins are not merely washed away in eternity; as a true son or daughter of the Father, you will be restored to the righteousness God always intended for you, and your sins will cease to exist. Here we would do best just to stop and marvel, to affirm what God has promised, and to exclaim with Paul:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

Our Father’s gifts are always greater, deeper, more expansive, and more perfect that we can even imagine. We pray “Thy will be done.” not only because it is the correct orientation of creature toward Creator, but also because He surely intends for us things both greater and more perfect than anything we could specifically formulate ourselves.

In Peter, we see that God will reach out to save us from drowning and, in Job, we see that God will not permit temptation, trial, affliction, or suffering to break us, no matter how bad or even bleak things may seem here in time. This life is certainly one of trials and tribulations — and anyone promising you anything else is selling something other than Christianity —, but we Christians have the security of knowing that God is for us and the great privilege of doing His work. More Christians have been called and commanded to live for the truth than have been called and commanded to die for it, but both have happened and both remain distinct possibilities. Whether you are called to lose and to endure everything for the faith or to live quietly and peacefully in good works, it is all for the glory of God and for your good.

Do good, live well, die well.

Amen.